On Saturday morning, Inbal Rabin-Lieberman may have been thinking about her twenty-sixth birthday, due two days later, when she heard the first explosions of the Hamas attack. Ruptured from her dreams on this Shabbat day, she quickly realizes that it’s not just the usual sound of rockets in the distance. The attack is much more serious. She quickly went to the armory of Kibbutz Nir Am, two kilometers northeast of the Gaza Strip, where she is the security coordinator.
“She ran like crazy from house to house to raise the alarm. She was one of the first in the entire country to understand what was happening,” her uncle Ami Rabin told the Times of Israel. While the women and children are being housed, Inbal Rabin-Lieberman distributes weapons to the kibbutz’s security team and positions everyone to ambush the 25 incoming Palestinian fighters.
Several hours of gunfire followed. According to local media, Inbal Rabin-Lieberman single-handedly eliminated five terrorists after almost four hours of fighting. His men defeated the twenty others. No members of Kibbutz Nir Am died this Saturday. A short time later, Inbal Rabin-Lieberman was evacuated with her community and honored by the mayor of Tel Aviv. “With composure and courage, she saved dozens of lives. Thanks to her, Kibbutz Nir Am was saved,” writes Ron Huldai on Facebook. After five days of fighting, Israel has its “heroine.”